A physiotherapist checks her website statistics and frowns. Visits from Google are noticeably down on last year. She hasn’t changed anything, her reviews are good and, oddly, new patients keep calling. Several of them mention that they “asked Google” which physio near them treats running injuries, and her practice came up in the answer.
She isn’t imagining either trend. Search is quietly changing shape. More and more often, Google, and a growing list of AI assistants, answer the question directly at the top of the page instead of simply offering a list of links. For many small businesses, that means fewer website visits, even when customers are still finding them.
That raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who has spent years trying to “rank on Google”. If people increasingly get their answer without clicking, what does it actually mean to be visible?
One Like insight: In AI search, being the answer matters more than being the link.
What changed
In 2025, the Pew Research Center put numbers on the shift. Its researchers analysed the real browsing data of 900 US adults, covering nearly 69,000 Google searches made in March 2025. About 18% of those searches produced an AI-generated summary at the top of the results.
When a summary appeared, users clicked on a traditional search result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there was no summary. Clicks on the links inside the summary itself were rarer still, at about 1% of visits. People who saw a summary were also more likely to end their browsing session altogether. Summaries appeared far more often for longer, more conversational searches: just 8% of one- or two-word searches triggered one, compared with 53% of searches of ten words or more.
That last detail matters for small businesses, because customers increasingly search the way they talk: “Which plumber near me can come out on a Sunday?” rather than “plumber”. Those are exactly the questions most likely to be answered on the page.
It’s worth keeping this in proportion. The study covered US users, and many local searches still lead to calls, map listings and visits. But the direction is clear. A growing share of customers will form their first impression of your business from a summary someone else wrote, not from your homepage.
Becoming the answer
AI summaries are built from information the system can find and trust. Pew found that a handful of sources, notably Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit, accounted for a large share of the links cited. For a small business, the practical lesson is less about chasing a ranking and more about making sure accurate, specific information about you exists in the places these systems read.
In practice, that comes down to a few unglamorous habits:
- Answer real questions plainly on your own site. If customers ask whether you work weekends, what areas you cover or how much a typical job costs, put clear answers on your website in plain language.
- Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current. Opening hours, services, service areas, photos and a short, specific description all give search tools something reliable to draw on.
- Be consistent everywhere. Your name, address, phone number and services should match across your website, directories and social profiles. Conflicting details make it harder for any system to trust what it finds.
- Earn mentions, not just links. Reviews, local press, community pages and industry listings that describe what you do help build a picture of your business that summaries can use.
[Infographic placement] From link to answer. Left: a classic search page with ten blue links, captioned Old goal: rank in the list. Right: an AI summary box answering “Who treats running injuries near me?” and naming a practice, with small source icons beneath (website FAQ, Google Business Profile, reviews, local directory). Captioned New goal: be the information the answer is built from. Footer: Pew Research Center (2025): clicks fell from 15% to 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared.
Measuring visibility differently
If fewer people click, website visits become a less reliable measure of how visible you are. It’s worth watching a broader set of signals: calls and direction requests from your Google Business Profile, enquiries that mention finding you through search or an AI assistant, and simply asking new customers how they heard about you. The physiotherapist’s falling traffic and steady phone calls make perfect sense once you count the right things.
A useful exercise is to ask an AI assistant the questions your customers would ask, such as “Who offers same-day boiler repairs in my area?”, and see what comes back. Is your business mentioned? Is the information correct? If not, where might it have looked?
A few questions can help:
- What are the five questions customers most often ask before choosing us, and are they answered clearly on our website?
- Is our Google Business Profile complete, accurate and recently updated?
- Do our details match everywhere we appear online?
- How do we know customers found us, if they never visited our website?
Which brings us back to the physiotherapist with the puzzling statistics. Her website hasn’t become less important. Its job has changed. Instead of only welcoming visitors, it now quietly briefs the systems that answer customers’ questions on her behalf. The clearer that briefing, the more often she’ll be the answer.
Sources
- Pew Research Center, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results”, 22 July 2025, as reported by Search Engine Land and other outlets.
